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Comment by EpiphanyMachine | Hacker News Reader

The system seems broken when states representing more than 50% of the population have to sue in court to try to change something like this. Instead with that much backing it should be done through the legislative branch. I'm concerned about the growing use of courts to try to decide policies because our legislative bodies can't work together and instead just try to force one sided issues through or block each other.

> Together, the AGs represent states totaling 165 million people — more than half of the U.S. population.

View on HN

I came here to say the opposite. The states are doing what they can to limit damaging actions by the federal government. This is the system working for the people. Without the ability or interest from the states to push back against the federal government's decrees, we would be stuck with an authoritarian nation.

Currently, trying to pass meaningful legislation is like trying to squeeze a watermelon through a pinhole. That should certainly be addressed, but we can't ignore the current battle just to focus on the bigger war.

> The states are doing what they can to limit damaging actions by the federal government.

Or rather, absence of action in this case.

> This is the system working for the people.

The system working for the people would be the states to make their own legislation. Using courts to force federal government to take action that elected executive and elected legislature do not support is not system working.

> Currently, trying to pass meaningful legislation is like trying to squeeze a watermelon through a pinhole.

Legislature is complex and hard. Not the reason to try and make courts into its replacement. That's not how the system is supposed to work, and doing that will result in a system even more broken than now.

> The system working for the people would be the states to make their own legislation. Using courts to force federal government to take action that elected executive and elected legislature do not support is not system working.

The tension between federal and state power is an intentionally designed feature of the system, and the fact that the states can push back is one of the several ways the system is supposed to work.

> The tension between federal and state power is an intentionally designed feature of the system

True, but "AGs of states finding friendly judge to force federal legislature to do their bidding" is not part of that design. If they just passed state-wide regulations and federal AG would sue them for it, then it'd be a different case, where one could justifiably invoke state rights. But in this case it's just plain lawfare.

It seems to me that it would be "lawfare" either way -- either the states would sue the Federal government or the Federal government would sue the states.

Lawfare is not when just somebody sues somebody else. It's when lawsuits are used to achieve goals that go way beyond and not connected with upholding the law - such as to enforce specific policy through courts, failing to pass it through legislative or executive branches.

The states brought suit in the court specified by federal law. They don't get to pick the judges. They're suing the FCC, not Congress.

The courts will either uphold the order or overturn it on procedural grounds. If they uphold the order, Congress doesn't have to do anything. If they overturn it, the FCC can try again, Congress can amend the procedures the FCC is required to follow, and/or Congress can enact the same rules the FCC improperly ordered.

The other part of the case is whether states can enforce their own regulations, which several have already passed. It's better for everyone to resolve that question promptly and with a single case. Declaratory judgment, where the courts resolve a dispute before it reaches a critical point, is part of the design.

It's called checks and balances, and it was how the system was designed to work.

> Legislature is complex and hard. Not the reason to try and make courts into its replacement. That's not how the system is supposed to work, and doing that will result in a system even more broken than now.

The courts aren't being used as a replacement, they're being used as a court. When one part of the government does something, you use another part of the government to counter it, until you've exhausted all your options. Then you can go back to the drawing board, which is to start a grassroots movement to push for overwhelming bipartisan support to force even a one-sided legislative branch to adopt the reforms you seek. It's an iterative process. Using the courts is not circumventing anything. You can always use legislation later to determine law that supersedes ruling by the courts, unless such legislation is found to be unconstitutional.

> It's called checks and balances, and it was how the system was designed to work.

No, it's not. Just repeating "checks and balances" doesn't mean courts can be abused for doing something that is not court's purpose. The court's purpose is preserving the consistency of legislation (including the Constitution as supreme, very hard to change part of the law) and adherence of executive to the law. In this case, the executive is clearly within the law, but some people are unhappy about it, so they want to abuse the courts to make them legislate from the bench that the policy must be different. This is not how the system is designed to work, this is the exact opposite of it.

> The courts aren't being used as a replacement, they're being used as a court.

They are being used to force through a policy that is not supported by either legislature or executive. That's not a function of a proper court.

> When one part of the government does something, you use another part of the government to counter it, until you've exhausted all your options.

No, that's not how it's supposed to work. It's not "try anything until my side wins, then block any attempt of other side to try anything at all". Your side may temporarily win, but when the other side does the same, you end up with the broken system where nobody respects any decisions and the only thing that matters is which side you're on. I call such system broken.

> They are being used to force through a policy that is not supported by either legislature or executive. That's not a function of a proper court.

They're asking the court to reverse the repealing of legislation, with the argument that the FCC should not have been allowed to repeal it because their legal reasoning was flawed.

Who is pushing policy? Was Obama pushing policy by instituting regulation? Was the FCC pushing policy by repealing it? Are the states pushing policy by trying to get the repeal revoked? Yes, Yes, Yes. Welcome to government.

It's all about pushing policy, any way you can. The system regulates the ability to push policy by allowing you to push policy, within the confines of the system, and gives you the tools to continually push or pull policy.

> Your side may temporarily win, but when the other side does the same, you end up with the broken system where nobody respects any decisions and the only thing that matters is which side you're on.

I re-watched the film Lincoln recently. It's basically about pushing for the 13th Amendment, well before it was politically tenable to adopt it. Bribery, back room deals, switching allegiances, concealing moves, political pressure, manipulation. Politics is the art of doing anything you possibly can to advance your agenda, to the exclusion of others' agendas. Your side doesn't even matter, it's what you can gain or lose that matters.

> the FCC should not have been allowed to repeal it because their legal reasoning was flawed

I have not been able to pin this down.

What law/rule did the FCC allegedly violate?

Check out the NY filing for more complete information about their arguments (https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/nn_govt_petitioners_br...). But the short answer is that the FCC is being accused of violating the Administrative Procedures Act.

The APA was created in response to the growth of government agencies tasked with creating regulations, essentially to curb the power of bureaucrats. Agencies are required to keep the public informed about possible changes to regulations and to allow for public participation, but what's relevant to this case is the process by which proposed changes are approved. In order to change the existing regulations, there has to be a formal review process, which involves gathering evidence and making a decision based on that evidence. Essentially, agencies like the FCC can't just change their rules on a whim, they have to look at all available evidence and actually come up with an argument for why the change needs to happen based on that evidence. Agency heads still get a decent amount of leeway, but standard is that their decisions cannot be "arbitrary and capricious." That's a legal term with a whole body of precedent behind it, google for more info.

I should also point out that suing based on the APA has come up a lot in this administration. My girlfriend is involved with environmental lobbying groups, and a number of the EPA rule changes proposed under the Trump administration have been thrown out because they did not properly follow the APA. The DOJ's repeal of DACA is also currently being challenged as violating the APA.

> they have to look at all available evidence and actually come up with an argument for why the change needs to happen based on that evidence.

Make sense. Proving this seems like it would be an enormously uphill battle.

It would have to be an unambiguously wrong decision on the part of the FCC. (Otherwise, the court essentially becomes the FCC by upholding/overturning any "wrong" decision.)

Given that it only became a policy recently, and the current amount of debate...it's hard to believe that the court would decide that not having NN is egregiously in the wrong. But we shall see.

Remember that the FCC has to explicitly provide their reasoning for making their decision. Those bringing this suit don't have to prove that not having NN is egregiously wrong, they just have to prove that the reasoning the FCC gave is egregiously faulty. It is a difficult battle, but not as hard as you might think.

Especially if the FCC points to things like the provably false public comments they collected as their reasoning. When they say use evidence like https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filing/1051157755251 it's not hard to prove that they didn't actually have reasoning for their decisions beyond "me and my lobbyists wanted it"

Wow, apparently that comment was taken from some kind of boilerplate. Who comes up with this stuff?

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filing/1051157755250

> It would have to be an unambiguously wrong decision on the part of the FCC.

The court—in an APA challenge—is not addressing whether the decision is right or wrong, but whether the process by which it was arrived at was complied with the legally-mandated process. Whether the decision is wrong (ambiguously or not) is beside the point, though that might be relevant to a challenge on other bases.

> Was Obama pushing policy by instituting regulation?

Yes.

> Was the FCC pushing policy by repealing it?

Yes.

> Welcome to government.

There's no problem with either Obama's executive or Trump's executive pushing their respective policies. People elected Obama, people got Obama's policies. People elected Trump next, people got Trump's policies. That's how it should work. The problem is when people are unhappy with Trump's policies and try to use courts to declare that only one side of the issue is legal and another is illegal. That's not how policymaking should work.

> It's all about pushing policy, any way you can.

Not in a proper government. In a proper government, courts should not be for pushing policy. If you want your policy, convince people to elect you and then enact the policy. Otherwise there would be no stable government possible - the Republicans would appoint their judges which would block every decision of Democrats, and Democrats would appoint their judges which would block every decision of Republicans, and it will always be about which team wins and never about getting anything good done. We're almost there anyway, but it's not a good thing, and there's no reason to make it even worse. Even if that means sometimes your team doesn't win.

> Politics is the art of doing anything you possibly can to advance your agenda

Why not murder your political opponents then (say you could get away with it at least long enough for the policy to be enacted?) Why not fake mass casualty terrorist attacks in the name of your opponents? Why there should be any rules at all? I think you'd agree there's some place where we'd like to draw the line. I'd want the line to be at using legislature for lawmaking and courts for enforcing laws.

What's broken is that there are "sides" at all. The American people are being restricted from free thinking on individual issues because of party-based politics. This is intentional, to create "wedge" issues out of thin air so we stay divided and whoever wants power has a shot at taking it.

Well, if the decision is "should we have state-enforced net neutrality regulations" then there would be "yes" and "no" sides I assume. Given binary-partisan US politics, there would be natural alignment of parties along such sides, but the yes/no question would remain even if we didn't have any parties at all.

This is very much a case of checks and balances. This article is a little misleading because it only quotes those filing suit saying that they don't like the FCC's actions. The actual suit filed (https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/nn_govt_petitioners_br...) has actual legal arguments. First, they argue the process by which the rule was passed was in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act. Second, they argue that the rule exceeds the FCC's authority by preventing states from enacting their own net neutrality regulation.

You seem to think "checks and balances" means "we have so many ways to get what I want through and it's ok to use any of them in any ways as long as at the end what I want is getting done". It's not the case. "Checks and balances" does not mean "if legislature doesn't get us the result I want, we should try courts next". It means each branch of the government has its role, and for the courts it's upholding the existing law, not creating policy. It is clear that the current dispute is a policy/political one - should we follow one policy or another. The courts is exactly the wrong place to decide such things, no matter how many times you say "checks and balances".

> they argue the process by which the rule was passed was in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act

Which may or may not be true (most likely not, since it would be stupid to undermine important policy decision by not signing a proper form, but of course one should never overestimate the federal government workers and their capacity of keeping things orderly). But if it's true, then they can just re-pass the same decision, now signing all the proper forms in the proper places and the end effect would be colossal waste of time and money and the same outcome at the end of it. Since FCC is the one to decide the policy, and head of the FCC has decided to not have NN, arguing essentially "but you didn't fill the TPC report in triplicate!" is not an argument against the policy that can be effective. It's also not a proper way to enact a policy.

> they argue that the rule exceeds the FCC's authority

That sounds ridiculous. Instituting NN does not exceed FCC authority, but reverting to pre-2015 does? I am not a lawyer, but for a common person that makes zero sense.

> by preventing states from enacting their own net neutrality regulation.

Hasn't then 2015 ruling been equally invalid for preventing states from enacting their own policies which do not include net neutrality regulations? If we argue it should be in the state level (which I'm always fine with) then 2015 rule should be rescinded and they should sue for restricting the current rule only to federal policy but allow states to enact their own policies. But don't they sue for reinstating 2015 policy instead?

I recommend reading the filing I linked (https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/nn_govt_petitioners_br...) for their arguments, but I'll summarize them here.

The alleged APA violation isn't a matter of not filling out the right forms, it's that their whole ruling was based on faulty logic. Basically the APA specifies that agencies have to make their rulings based on existing evidence and provide evidence-based reasoning for their decisions. The agency gets a decent amount of leeway on that reasoning, as long as it is not "arbitrary and capricious," which is a legal standard. The filing claims they did act arbitrarily and capriciously. For example, part of the FCC's change was made on the grounds that BIAS providers have voluntarily committed to not throttling customers and there is little evidence that they have ever done so, which completely ignores the fact that the reason they historically have not throttled people is because it was illegal, and thus was not voluntary. Again, you can read the filing for more information about their argument, it starts on page 35 in the PDF.

The argument that the rule exceeds the FCC's authority is based on the fact that the FCC recently disavowed have Title II authority over broadband. Title II authority gave the FCC the ability to preempt state and local laws. The new ruling is based on Title I authority, which can only allow the FCC to preempt state and local laws if the authority is rooted in some other statutorily mandated responsibility, which the FCC does not have. The actual argument is pretty technical, but that's the gist of it.

> The filing claims they did act arbitrarily and capriciously.

And that's baloney. There are arguments for and against NN, and just claiming "pooh, these other guys just saying nonsense, ignore them" is not a valid argument. It's asking the court to decide that only one side of the policy is correct, and the other side is just idiots. That's not how political decisions should be made in a democratic country.

> which completely ignores the fact that the reason they historically have not throttled people is because it was illegal

If it was illegal before 2015, then doesn't returning to pre-2015 state keep it so? In any case, if it's not illegal now, the Congress can easily make it illegal, it's not for the court to decide that though. Again, the discussion of whether we can trust providers to not throttle and whether we need government regulation to enforce that does not belong in court. It belongs in public discourse, which leads to electing representatives, which produce relevant legislation (or don't if people do not elect those representatives that want to do it).

> The actual argument is pretty technical, but that's the gist of it.

I am not nearly qualified to evaluate the technical arguments on merit, but for a common person something like "it's legal to enact NN, but it's illegal to rescind this action" sounds insane. If they just said "you're ok to remove federal NN rules, but you can't prevent us to make such rules on more local level", then they might have an argument there (though it still doesn't make that decision "arbitrary", it's just a discussion about limits of federalism in a particular case) but is that what they are arguing? I thought they are arguing for the return of federal legislation as enacted in 2015, aren't they?

> Or rather, absence of action in this case.

Issuing an order is an action. The states claim that the federal executive didn't follow the legally required procedure.

> The system working for the people would be the states to make their own legislation.

The federal executive says they can't. The states are asking the courts to say they can.

The ability for these State Attorneys General to do this is good. The fact that it had to come down to this is terrible.

>> The states are doing what they can to limit damaging actions by the federal government.

I wonder how many of those states made laws forbidding or working against municipal broadband.

and how many of them have made any effort to clean up the permitting processes for rolling out fiber.

Here is a list of all 22 states that filed, with links to their local roadblocks to municipal broadband (if any):

California : https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

Connecticut

D. C.

Delaware

Hawaii

Illinois

Iowa

Kentucky

Maine

Maryland

Massachusetts

Minnesota : https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

Mississippi

New Mexico

New York

North Carolina : https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

Oregon

Pennsylvania : https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

Rhode Island

Vermont

Virginia : https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

Washington : https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

It does not surprise me in the least that the executive branch of a state (which includes the AG's office) is supporting net neutrality at the federal level while the legislative is passing state-level laws to hamstring it.

I live in one of these states with bans on municipal broadband, NC. The relationship between our Republican super-majority General Assembly and our Democrat governor is completely dysfunctional, and our districts are so gerrymandered that we, the people, can't fix it. Republicans in the GA have been calling special sessions all summer to override the governor's vetoes. The GA recently put several state constitutional amendments up for referendum in November, aimed squarely at stripping the governor of more powers (something no one ever mentioned during our last Republican governor's term.) This is not going to change any time soon (see: gerrymandering.)

Our AG suing the fed is literally our only option to block most of the madness happening at the federal level (until the Supreme court rules on partisan gerrymandering,) because our legislative branch no longer works for the people, they simply push party and lobbyist agendas at all costs.

You both are likely correct.

How about "it's the fallback system working for the people"?

The House of Representatives majority, which is held by the GOP and is anti - net neutrality, also represents more than 50% of the US population by this method of counting (which says the state AGs “represent” people who didn’t vote for them).

Under the constitutional system of the US something like net neutrality could be passed as a law by the congress, but there hasn’t been a congress that chose to do so.

Yes, and it's interesting some of those states have an AG sueing for a policy the House Representatives won't support.

Also interesting is who the Representatives represent when supporting the abolishment of NN.

Maybe the way you calculate representation is wrong when 30% of the population gets 50% of the vote.

It represents a gerrymandered "50%" of the population.

Not sure why you’re downvoted when you’re right. The senate is meant to be the equalizer, where all states are on equal footing. The House is intended to favor more populous regions. It’s not that the people of the US don’t have as much of a say as they should — it’s that they don’t have _any_ say, anywhere.

The Senate actually came up with a resolution to reinstate NN but Paul Ryan refuses to bring it up for a vote in the House. So there is your legislative bottleneck. If it passes the house and the senate, of course trump will sign it and take credit for it. Not a difficult task there.

> If it passes the house and the senate

If. It is likely to pass the House?

> of course trump will sign it

If Trump supports it, why doesn't he instruct Ajit Pai to implement this policy, or if he doesn't want to do it, why doesn't he replace Ajit Pai with somebody whose views on the subject align with those of Trump? I think it might be because Trump doesn't actually support it.

Trump doesn't actually care about it, and I would be surprised if he understood it. Right now he's against it because Obama did it.

I think you confuse the caricature of Trump that is pleasing to you to behold because you disagree with him with the actual Trump. While it is pleasing to think people you disagree with are blithering idiots, in case one of them is a President of the US the ignorance of the real state of affairs is not on your side and is not going to serve you well. It is always wrong to underestimate your opponent, it's particularly dangerous if the opponent has a lot of power.

You raise some decent points in general, but it is hard to apply them to Trump in the case of net neutrality because he has actually spoken out on it [1]:

> Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media

[1] https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/53260835850816716...

In general, having Trump speaking on something in 2014 doesn't mean he'd not flip on it in 2018, but Trump has showed very definite desire for reducing regulations, so without an explicit statement I'd say it's unlikely he'd support Net Neutrality. He also doesn't have much tactical reason to - NN is the cause of major content companies, like FAANG, and those are no Trump's friends, and neither they are friends of his base. So Trump has no reason to try and make nice with them.

You have heard Trump speak right? You've heard his nuclear speech and his mouth instrument speech? You've read transcripts of his interviews? Listened to him ramble incoherently while tries to answer questions? Read his tweets? "I'm a very stable genius." "I have the best words." "My IQ is one of the highest." etc...

It's hard not to believe the caricature is real when the person creating it is Trump himself. Half of his tweets sound like literal caricature.

This is all completely independent of any disagreements I have with him. I saw Trump give a speech sometime in the early 2000s long before he was a serious political candidate. I thought he sounded like an idiot back then too.

Of course it's possible that he is actually very intelligent, but he just sounds dumb when he talks, or maybe he tries to sound like that to be more appealing to his base.

If that's the case though, you can hardly blame someone for taking him at face value.

Yes, I've heard Trump speak. And I've read the soundbites that people whose only professional interest seems to be to hunt soundbites collected. And since Trumps loves to speak, and his speech style is very peculiar, there's a lot of soundbites. But I also looked beyond the soundbites, and that is what any person that wants to understand and not just confirm their biases formed on Twitter should do. And if you look beyond the soundbites, Trump is not an idiot (neither are Bush, Obama, Clinton or any other politicians who people who get paid for painting caricatures and monetizing them as clicks painted as idiots). He is somewhat of an opportunist, though this is pretty common among politicians. He also has some very definite agenda - which is not to everybody's liking, of course - and part of this agenda is massive deregulation. If you didn't notice that, you may have been paying too much attention to twitter noise and too little attention to what is actually happening in the government (which, contrary to popular belief, is not ruled by tweets).

>He also has some very definite agenda

I don't think this is true at all. You could say that deregulation is his is goal, but you'd have to ignore his opposition to free trade and immigration, which are every bit as central to his policies as tax cuts, and reigning in the EPA.

His agenda is whatever works for him right now. He throws out policy ideas and sees what sticks. Granted it does take some amount of intelligence to recognize what's working and what's not, but I think his success is mostly a product of iteration and luck--he's been sticking his toes in politics since the late 90s.

But let's say he is fairly intelligent--his ability to believe his own bullshit means that he is just plain wrong about as often as someone who is actually just dumb. Completely ignoring his speaking style, he is just constantly, factually wrong. He's wrong about little details that aren't politically advantageous to lie about.

And like you said, he likes to talk, but nothing he's ever written or spoken about gives me any indication that he has more than a surface level understanding of any topic.

> If it passes the house and the senate, of course trump will sign it and take credit for it

That's pretty much inconceivable. He made repealing it part of his campaign, and specifically claimed that it was an Obama power grab designed to target conservative media.

Even if he has decided since then that net neutrality is acceptable, or even actually desirable and wants it to happen, he would not do it by merely reinstating the 2015 rules for that would be a tacit admission that he was wrong during the campaign.

He would do it by having new rules written, so that he could say that he fixed the Obama rules.

Like legislators, attorneys general represent "the people," not just those who voted for them, and that is the case even if no one voted for them. (As an interesting side-note, there are a few states whose attorneys general is governor-appointed and even one whose attorney general is appointed by the state's Supreme Court.)

I believe the point being made was that it has been too difficult to get Congress to act on reinstating something that is overwhelmingly popular across the nation. The FCC won't do it. Congress won't do it. Yet, when we put some numbers behind it, WaPo reported in December of last year on a study concluding that 8 in 10 Americans disapproved of the FCC's handling of net neutrality.

> study concluding that 8 in 10 Americans disapproved of the FCC's handling of net neutrality.

Disapproved about which part of its handling on the issue though? Did they disapprove of it being instated or revoked? Or the timeline on which either occurred? Or did they disagree with FCC shoehorning it with regulations written for telephones?

Not OP, but I think they're referring to this story [0] about a survey conducted by the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland. The results showed 83% opposition to repealing the existing net neutrality regulations. A lot of the coverage around this topic makes it out to be a partisan issue, but all of the research shows strong support for net neutrality regulations across the board.

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/13...

The executive branch being in control of this is how we ended up in this mess. It should be done through legislation so it won't change with the White House.

You are totally right, updating my comment! It was removed by the FCC but should be added back by Congress.

The executive branch puts forth that they've banned net neutrality by virtue of not regulating it and are attempting to argue against state's rights at a convenient time when that party often argues for state's rights.

I feel like they're trying to get people to conflate representation of >50% of people with support from >50% of people. The attorneys general of 22 states is 22 people. The percentage support in the general population is high (~80% last year) but they aren't the same thing. Marketing is everything.

I completely agree that it should be decided in the legislature. I hate the idea of legislating from the bench. It was administrative policy when enacted in the Obama administration. Why should that enshrine it?

The system's not broken. If that many people in that many states really want net neutrality legislation, then they should advocate for that within the House of Representatives, who are our direct representatives at the federal level. The Presidency is designed to have broad national appeal---across rural and urban states, large and small states---so it's not enough that a minority of attorneys-general want regulatory change.

Except that, due to gerrymandering, the ratios of our federal representatives don't match the ratios of the population.

And even if you were to argue that gerrymandering didn't swing overall election results (it does), gerrymandering also makes certain seats more secure than they normally would be -- causing certain politicians to become incumbents. What reason does an incumbent have to listen to their local community's grievances? Their job isn't at risk if they don't please the public (which is the opposite of how it should be).

So, even if the House of Representatives was a direct representation of the US population, they would still not have the incentive to listen to their populace.

Even more egregious is the proportioned delegates within the electoral college.

While it is possible that the electoral college needs improvement or replacement, any proposals along those lines should be sure to address the dangers of pure majority rule. While imperfect the electoral college is meant to be a way to mitigate that failures mode of democracy.

I doubt democracy is kept in balance by the fact that Californian’s have a fraction of their vote count as compared to Iowans. I can’t imagine that the skewing of representation is actually a positive feature of the system.

We aren't just a representative republic. We are a federal republic, with rural and urban states, with large and small states, and the EC helps balance these competing interests. What Californians "lose" in terms of representative power in presidential elections, they more than make up in the legislature (53 seats in the House vs. Iowa's 4), never mind their influence on national economic policy by virtue of being the most populous state.

That the Electoral College defies the spirit of "one person, one vote" is a feature, not a bug. The EC forces presidential candidates to have broad national appeal. It's the difference between the Superbowl, where you win if you score the most points in one game, and the World Series, where you win only if you win the most games. The Superbowl is biased toward outliers---teams that have inconsistent overall performance but one really good day can win, but that doesn't mean they're the best team that year. The World Series mitigates that bias by forcing teams to win consistently---a team can have one really good day but still lose the series because they can't perform well all the time. Likewise, because of the EC presidential candidates aren't competing in just one election but in fifty-one, and that means appealing to more than just coastal states or urban population centers (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_Stat...).

Conversely, our direct representatives at the federal level are members of the House (by design) and the Senate (as of the 17th Amendment). All of this focus on the EC and the Presidency is misplaced. While we need a President with broad appeal, we also need Representatives (and to a lesser degree, Senators) who represent our interests, and here's where I think federal election reformers should focus: on alternate voting systems (like in Massachusetts), on better voter enrollment and balloting mechanisms (like in one of the PNW states, maybe it was Washington's that caught my eye), on non-partisan redistricting, and on publicly funding candidates. These reforms can and should start at the state level.

The genius of western liberal democracy isn't just the allocation of political power to the people but also the careful balancing of competing interests: No one bloc should have too much political power. Eliminating the Electoral College would be a move away from this balance. The right place to drive nationwide political change is in the House of Representatives, not the White House.

Hard disagree - I personally will never agree to the idea that fairness is achieved by taking away people’s representation in their elected leader.

It’s a stretch to call the electoral college the genius of western democracy, since every other western democracy doesn’t celebrate a system in which the minority can rule over the majority. The fact that every other major democracy can achieve this without stealing votes is a worrying tell. American presidential elections are becoming increasingly unrepresentative, with the winner of these contests being the opposite choice of the voters who actually voted (Bush ‘00 and Trump ‘16). I think this distortion is a root cause of political paralysis today, as narrow minded interests continue to assert their control over national policy at the direct expense of the majority.

This is in addition to the fact that the electoral college is a throwback to before America was actually a democracy, and part of a system which was explicitly designed to enslave a portion of citizenry and disenfranchise an additional portion. Lastly, if the goal was to moderate the influence of urban vs rural areas, the population differences between 2018 and 1830’s America are quite staggering, and trying to use a system based on 1830’s population levels is nonsensical.

> While it is possible that the electoral college needs improvement or replacement, any proposals along those lines should be sure to address the dangers of pure majority rule.

The protection against unchecked bare majority rule is Constitutional limits on the power of government, and an independent judiciary not tied to momentary electoral majority enforcing that, and checks and balances between the separately-elected (both in terms of balloting and timing) political branches. It's possible some of those things could be improved from the status quo system (e.g., moving elections for both houses of Congress forward or back one year so that in addition to different term length, Congressional elections were never simultaneous with Presidential ones.)

Skewing representation in a relatively consistent way (the structural bias in representation in the House, Electoral College, and Senate is all in the same direction, though escalating in degree as you move through that list) does not reduce the danger of tyranny of the majority, it just favors particular interests over others in establishing such a tyranny (and even enables tyranny of the minority, so long as it aligns with the advantaged interest.)

I think it's a very common pattern now - to use courts as substitute for policymaking, since finding one judge that would issue necessary injunction, whatever it is, is easier than assembling a broad coalition to pass the decision through legislative/executive branches. It is also very wrong and very corrosive to the respect to the rule of law - if judges turn from independent arbiters watching for rules of the game into partisan players that use their power to bend the game to their side, eventually they'd have as much respect as other rank-and-file politicians, and that's not a very good place for the country to be in.

> Together, the AGs represent states totaling 165 million people — more than half of the U.S. population.

By this logic, the executive branch represents 100% of the population.

They do. Donald Trump represents us all.

It's the flip side to preventing what they called "Tyranny of the Majority", if my freshman polisci memory from many moons ago is accurate.

Imagine a scenario where the states wanted to make abortion illegal. We would want that decision scrutinized vs making a change to the law simply because a majority wanted it.

>The system seems broken when

When it does stuff you disagree with personally. That's a pretty universal feeling. While you may get plenty of internet points from your friends that agree with you, you have to realize, you are the one with the unpopular opinion this time.

>50% of the population

Counting illegals. 22 states isn't 50% either. This is the "not my president" argument all over again.

The people won. ISPs won. FAANG lost. It's time FAANG pays their share for video streaming bandwidth. It's not like they don't have plenty of money parked in offshore banks to cover the gap. This is just a tactic for them to sow more division and hope for a favorable future election outcome. Pretty disturbing to watch actually if you agree with Ajit Pai and internet freedom.

Thanks for the comedy relief. Putting Ajit Pai and internet freedom in the same phrase can only exist on a crass comedy or a complete malicious misunderstanding of the cause.

The people won nothing, who won are entrenched monopolistic companies that don't step on their customer's neck just because it's illegal. Fb and Google are not yet that evil, though Fb is definitely making an effort.

A minority of the people won. Let's be clear there. Due to the House being capped, the GOP can hold 55.2% of the seats with 49.9% of the votes. Talking purely votes, not population.

And that's even ignoring the snarky comment about the people that voted the current majority in being from the less economically useful areas.

> It's time FAANG pays their share for video streaming bandwidth

They do pay their share.

In general, when party X and party Y communicate on the internet, they both pay a service provide (their ISP) for a connection to the internet backbone. That payment to their ISP fully pays for the costs of the data X and Y send to or receive from the internet (or their ISP won't stay in business for long).

What you are calling "internet freedom" is party X's ISP saying it won't allow X to communicate with Y unless Y also pays X's ISP, even though X is already paying X's ISP for the bandwidth X is using with Y.

The ISP paid for the network. They have the right to do what they want with it. That's internet freedom. The government has no business telling me how to run my personal network. It has no business telling ISPs how to run theirs. On top of it all, FAANG are direct competitors eroding those ISPs' cable tv business in most cases. So it's not just a matter of the government telling the ISPs how to run their network, it's the government picking a winner.

Tell me, if FAANG has a problem with internet freedom, why don't they just build their own ISPs? Answer, that's expensive. That's why Google quit building fiber after a half dozen cities. So instead, they want "net neutrality" which is where ISPs pay for the networks, FAANG takes all the money, and ISP customers get stuck with rising prices. No thanks.

What you keep overlooking is that FAANG are fully paying the ISPs whose bandwidth they use.

When I choose to watch, say, an Amazon Prime video that uses 3 GB of bandwidth Amazon uses 3 GB of Amazon's ISP's bandwidth to deliver that stream to the internet backbone.

The various internet backbone providers pass that data through the backbone, according to peering agreements they have made among themselves, on financial terms they have agreed to among themselves.

The backbone delivers the data to my ISP. From there my ISP uses 3 GB of bandwidth to deliver the data to me. That 3 GB of bandwidth is bandwidth I paid for. I pay my ISP something like $100/month in exchange for 1000 GB of bandwidth to be used that month.

Amazon is not using any of my ISPs bandwidth. I am using my bandwidth, which I bought from my ISP, to receive data from Amazon.

The only bandwidth that Amazon is using when I watch a Prime video is the bandwidth of Amazon's ISP, which Amazon's ISP charges them for.

> On top of it all, FAANG are direct competitors eroding those ISPs' cable tv business in most cases.

One can run a content provision business without running an ISP, and one can run and ISP without running a content business. That some ISPs are also content providers is not really relevant to the question of how internet should be regulated.

> So it's not just a matter of the government telling the ISPs how to run their network, it's the government picking a winner.

You've got that backwards. Net neutrality stops ISPs that are also content providers from using a tying arrangement to prevent normal market forces from choosing the most efficient way to provide content.

Question: how come I've never seen the people against net neutrality trying to repeal "telephone neutrality"?

For example, suppose you pick up your phone and try to call a local pizza joint to order delivery. Do you think you phone company should be allowed to make a deal with Domino's where Domino's pays the local phone company and the local phone company won't put through calls to non-Domino's pizza joints?

Or suppose the phone company also owns a restaurant. Should they be allowed to refuse to let you call restaurants other than theirs unless those restaurants pay your phone company. Assume the restaurants' are on a different phone system than the one you use.

Both of those things are illegal on the phone system, and have been so far a long time.

> It's time FAANG pays their share for video streaming bandwidth.

They do though.

FAANG pay their respective ISPs for X gigabit connections to their data centers. I pay my ISP for a Y megabit connection.

I shouldn't have to pay my ISP extra to have access to Netflix just because Netflix will use up a constant 8-12 mbps data stream. Why should I pay more to access Netflix versus any other high-bandwidth application?

Federalism is about the states, not the population within those sovereign states. The US government is a federal system, population of specific states has little relevance. It seems like a nit-pick, but a misunderstanding federalism leads to assertions that the population actually matters when it comes to federal rules. The EU works similarly — otherwise why have a “rotating” presidency rather than simply having France and Germany pick the president by virtue of larger populations? Would Poland Lithuania find a population-based Presidency fair? Of course not, but Lithuania has an equal right to representation as a nation as would France — to think otherwise would be to destroy the EU (or the United States.)

It is a similar story with medical and recreational marijuana legalization.

Did that premise matter to you when a majority of californians voted to ban gay marriage? Did you jump up and say 'the system is broken'. I really doubt it.

[Comment redacted for being not well thought out and more cynical and less positive than I'd like to be]

Either you are not keeping up or have a lot of bias because the government makes a lot of changes every year and you will presumably agree with many of them.

EX: While many people hate it, Obama Care got rid of the preexisting condition exception on health insurance. Which was a major issue for many people.

Now you personally might not like that change, but that suggests you should like it when it's removed.

> because our legislative bodies can't work together

This is not (just) a people failure, it's a system failure. More precisely, it's the highly polarizing FPTP voting system that allows one party to dominate almost completely every election cycle instead of having to cooperate with others to government, regardless of how bad their behavior was the last time they run the government. With FPTP, it's just a matter of time before each of the two parties regains power, regardless of the policies they may promote. With FPTP the whole "red team vs blue team" game is inevitable, because FPTP promotes the existence of only two (very) long-term parties.

The second issue is of course the issue of companies and wealthy people buying politicians' votes through lobbying. I mean, who can deny it at this point? It's very clear that this is what lobbying actually does. It's not used just to "try and convince politicians" of something at this point - it's almost literally used to buy the votes.

A solution for each of these problems would be these:

http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation#what_is_fair_vot...

https://anticorruptionact.org/

https://www.wolf-pac.com/the_solution

FPTP is bad but it's compounded by the presidential system. For example the UK's Prime Minister is elected by MPs, so it's not possible for them to be of a party that doesn't have enough voting power to actually pass laws, whereas in the US this is a common occurrence (as well as the President vetoing laws that the assembly has passed).

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